Thu, March 10, 2011 7:00 pm at Alwan for the Arts

In this groundbreaking book, Ilham Khuri-Makdisi establishes the existence of a special radical trajectory spanning four continents and linking Beirut, Cairo, and Alexandria between 1860 and 1914. She shows that socialist and anarchist ideas were regularly discussed, disseminated, and reworked among intellectuals, workers, dramatists, Egyptians, Ottoman Syrians, ethnic Italians, Greeks, and many others in these cities. In situating the Middle East within the context of world history, Khuri-Makdisi challenges nationalist and elite narratives of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern history as well as Eurocentric ideas about global radical movements. The book demonstrates that these radical trajectories played a fundamental role in shaping societies throughout the world and offers a powerful rethinking of Ottoman intellectual and social history.lham Khuri-Makdisi is Associate Professor of Middle East and World history at Northeastern University. Her book, The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism 1860-1914 (University of California Press), sheds light on the various networks of intellectuals, dramatists, and workers circulating in the Eastern Mediterranean and articulating radical leftist ideas in the late 19th century. Khuri-Makdisi received her Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University.

“The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism is the perfect antidote to the deterministic histories that have for so long obscured how the Middle East came to modernity. Khuri-Makdisi rightly argues that it was both more complex and more open to the outside influences than either nationalist historians (who see only the state) or the partisans of the new orientalism (who see only Islam) have been willing to admit. This book has been badly needed for some time.”—Edmund Burke III, co-editor of The Environment and World History